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Compensation for Bandwidth Costs is Extortion?
Tha_Big_Guy23 asks: "According to this article, a man who created a website for his local Sheriff's department is being charged with extortion. This was caused by taking down the website after repeated attempts to get compensation from the county to cover the bandwidth costs. As a result, all his personal computer property, and company computer property was seized and he was jailed."
"After being jailed he was charged with extortion, larceny by conversion, using a computer to commit a crime, and obstruction of justice. This website explains in more detail the circumstances surrounding the situation. Has anyone on Slashdot ever had an experience where a client was unwilling to compensate you for either your work, and/or the resources required to do your work?"
While the end result of this situation is a shame, let this situation serve as a warning for those of you who work, without a contract in place. While it is the general hope that people will behave in an honorable manner, sometimes this is just not the case, and contracts exist to protect both parties, when things go sour.
While the end result of this situation is a shame, let this situation serve as a warning for those of you who work, without a contract in place. While it is the general hope that people will behave in an honorable manner, sometimes this is just not the case, and contracts exist to protect both parties, when things go sour.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
An article from today on this topic.
Perhaps this should be a lessong to all to work out your contracts a bit more clearly in advance.
$300,000 for three years is...
$100,000 for one year, which is...
$ 8,333 for one month of hosting.
(blatant_plug)
Well, don't host with that guy, come host with Tigerhost.com. We only charge $100/month for businesses! (And $16 for personal sites.)
(/blatant_plug)
Seriously, though, at those rates, he could retire on just that one site.
libertarianswag.com
Taking something away from someone else and threatening not to return it until they give you money. It doesn't matter if they OWE you money anyway, that's extortion.
If someone owes you money and they are not giving it to you, the correct thing to do is hire a lawyer. Vigilantism may make you feel better, but it's against the law.
---
A Shelby Township Web site operator is accused of trying to extort $300,000 from the county's primary law enforcement agency the Macomb County Sheriff's Office.
Patrick Arthur Richard, 37, faces four felonies, including extortion, for allegedly holding the sheriff's office Web site hostage in exchange for money. Richard's Running Wolf Inc. operated the sheriff's office Internet site for nearly three years as a free service before shutting it down three months ago because the county wouldn't pay him.
"This is a case of someone trying to get rich quick," said Eric Kaiser, chief trial attorney for the Macomb County Prosecutor's Office. "He was given the privilege of carrying the banner of the Macomb County Sheriff's department and he tried to take advantage of it."
Richard's attorney, James Simmons, however, called the charges "absurd" and said his client merely attempted to negotiate with Hackel and his staff.
He argued the conflict should be resolved in civil court.
"Everyone should sit down and come up with a negotiated price," Simmons said. "This is no more a case of extortion than someone going to a car dealer and offering the dealer less than the listed price, then leaving because he didn't get it. This is really extortion by the sheriff's department."
Richard, who is free on a $5,000 personal bond, faces a preliminary examination today in 41B District Court in Mount Clemens on charges of extortion, using a computer to commit a crime, larceny by conversion and obstruction of justice. The most serious charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Richard, a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division, more than three years ago offered to provide the Web site at no cost to the county as an in-kind contribution. Hackel, who enthusiastically supported it, said Richard agreed to operate it in exchange for publicity for his company.
The Web site, www.macombsheriff.com, debuted in March 2001 to praise by officials. Richard said it attracted 3.5 million hits per month from throughout the world.
The site provided comprehensive information about the department, a way for the public to communicate with police and archives of newspaper articles.
A year or so ago, Richard started talking with Hackel's staff about earning income from the site. An attempt was made to secure advertisements for the site with profits going to Richard, but Hackel said that generated only a small response.
Richard then demanded $300,000 of taxpayer dollars from the county. Richard said the money would offset the huge expense of running the Web site for the 33 months.
"That was by no means the end of negotiations," said Simmons, Richard's attorney. "He shut it down because he didn't want to lose any more money."
But Hackel said that exorbitant demand amounts to extortion.
"He built up the site so that we would rely on it so much and would pay him," Hackel said. "(But) that content belongs to all of us."
Kaiser said the actual expense to run the site was miniscule compared to the demand.
Simmons said the Web site included a disclaimer that said it was owned by Running Wolf Inc.
"The sheriff's department never disputed that fact when the site was up," Simmons said.
Kaiser responded to Simmon's claim that the case is a civil matter.
"The O.J. (O.J. Simpson) case showed us that a criminal case can be a civil case," he said.
Hackel said Richard also impeded the investigation by the Macomb Area Computer Enforcement team, which seized Richard's computer and related records. Richard lied to investigators by claiming he sold the domain name to a Virginia company, Hackel said.
Hackel said his mistake was placing too much trust in Richard and agreeing to have Richard pay the nominal domain fee. Richard retains authority of the domain name.
Since the
Read TFA, not skim TFA.
According to the second link in the article, he spent $300,000 of his own money and is not asking for his inventment back. He simply tried to tell the county that, going forward, he couldn't afford to pay for it himself. When they ignored him, he closed up shop to keep from losing more money. They retaliated by arresting him and slapping him with exortion and other charges.
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
You're right. Posting this article was wrong of /.. Once again, they did not research the topic, and whoever submitted the article was trigger happy and didn't read up on it either.
But there are companies who will rip you off. I did a web site for a friend, and he started complaining about an extra $1 charge the ISP levied, calling them all 'crooks', and ultimately none of us ever got paid - and we were doing it 'cut rate' because he kept reminding us he was our friend and should be entitled to a 'good deal'.
The quotes you state are from the Justice 4 Pat campaign, an apparently biased source drumming up support for Pat.
Personally, I'd trust a newspaper over blatant assertions by an activist site any day.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The courts will decide.
"You owe me $300,000 for services rendered."
vs.
"Pay me $300,000 or I'll shut you down and keep you out of your data"
What was the oral contract? The Sheriffs dept most likely owns the website and the content on it, and this guy was just hosting it.
If he doesn't want to host it, fine, they take their business elsewhere. He sues for services rendered, etc..
But if he threatened to hold the content hostage, he probably crossed the line into extortion. He was demanding money to release property he didnt have a claim over. It would be like me taking home the sourcecode from my company, and demanding a payoff to give it back.
DA's file charges, not local podunk Sherriff's (With whom I work with every day so I know how little power they actually have). DA's usually aren't very thrilled when Barney Fife shows up with some frivolous overblown charge.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I'm a programmer. My friend works in IT at a local USDA lab. One of the scientists there told my friend they needed to automate some of their "blasting". They needed to take DNA they found in plants and compare it to a bunch of national databases and depending on the results take it to other national databases, etc. etc (these national databases were all websites so it was A LOT of text processing). The final results needed to be put into an excel spreadsheet. I worked for a couple of months and had about 4 complete rewrites. It worked fine at my house, but it did not work at their labs.
What happened was, they had many many computers being natted with one ip address. These websites would see one ip address flooding their servers and cut them off or give one of MANY random errors. It was almost impossible to reproduce anywhere else. I got almost no co-operation on their part to get more ip addresses for the boxes doing the dna blasting. All they would say is "It doesn't work right". That was the extent of my bug reporting. "It doesn't work right".
It was basically impossible to get meetings with them and the project lasted about 5 months with only 5 meetings (each lasting less than a half hour). After not seeing one penny of payment and MANY thousands of lines of code later, I told them I'm not going to work on it anymore until I get some payment. That's about when I couldn't get a hold of them anymore.
That was my first and last time working on code without a contract before hand. I did not recieve a single penny for my months of work. They acted like they were in it to help out a young programmer. The USDA was in it to help the USDA. About the end of it all they hired a "programmer". One of these people who had many degrees and could "program" in many languages, but couldn't write a simple program on the spot. From what I understand they tried to get him to write it because he was supposed to be this experienced programmer with many degrees. It made me feel good that after 6 months they still don't have anything from him.
They were greedy. They taught me a lesson. Don't work for ANYONE, without a contract before hand. No matter how much they pretend they are looking out for your interests, THEY'RE NOT.
From the article(as quoted above):
"Richard, a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division, more than three years ago offered to provide the Web site at no cost to the county as an in-kind contribution. Hackel, who enthusiastically supported it, said Richard agreed to operate it in exchange for publicity for his company." [emphasis mine]
If that is accurate, then the guy tried to retroactively change the fee, exploiting the fact that there wasn't a written contract. The response is definitely extreme, though; it could probably have been settled with much less drastic measures.
NB: YMMV. IANAL. Take the above with a grain of salt.
And then there's his final bill... $300,000?! To offset the "huge expense" of running the website? WHAT huge expense? How much was he paying for hosting?
FWIW, his firm is Running Wolf with an IP address of 66.216.120.156 which is owned by none other than... Rackspace.com. I don't think their bandwidth is quite so expensive.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I know a bit myself, but have no interest in really sharing anything as my memory might not be perfect on all matters detailing some of the things this 'sheriff' has been involved in.
Needless to say, I am certain that one could find something searching goole, The Detroit News or Detroit Free Press and other Michigan, Detroit Area publications.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
While I agree that the number of hits sounds fairly unlikely, your "proof" is not much better.
Alexa's statistics are generated/limited to the people who have that silly little Alexa toolbar installed on their system - and frankly, that is a very small segment of the population.
As a staff person for a website ranked in the top 300 of the world (by Nielsen//NetRatings), I can say that I'd never give much weight to any statistics that are based on Amazon's Alexa service.
This for 3.5 million users per year.
Actually, that's 3.5 million users per month...
42 million per year
115.5 million for the lifetime of the site
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Yeah, but they didn't have a contract. Regardless of what he verbally agreed to, there was no legal document stating what is and what should be.
.. well, they didn't have a contract, so any situations or change of minds that later pop up you can't really do much about legall except for firing him.
Based on that, he CAN (although it's not professional) at a later date say, "Look, this is eating up my time and I feel I should be compensated for this." He *can* charge whatever he wants, too. If they don't like it, they can let him go and get someone else to host it (suing for the domain and site is different than accusing someone of "extortion" and throwing them in jail). Granted, the domain will belong to them since they are the Macomb Sherrif's department, but... what he did is NOT illegal by any means.
It's just as much their fault as it is HIS for not making a contract. His fault because, look, you don't have a contract, they aren't obligated to pay you a dime. It's their fault because
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
His actions certainly are not reasonable.
They didn't pay, he shut down the site. Explain the part of that you consider "unreasonable", please?
Whether or not you consider the magnitude of his bill to the county as reasonable, it boils down simply to "he provided a service, sent a bill, bill went unpaid, he stopped providing the service". Nothing more than that.
Theft of service also breaks the law. Key difference, a private individual doesn't have the power to abuse to have people from the country government frivolously arrested.
Also, RTFA (in particular, the second link). He did not send them a bill for $300k... He said his total expenses came out to $300k (not unreasonable, if he actually worked something resembling full-time for 2-3 years... That alone gives $200k+ depending on the going rate in his area for a network admin). He didn't even attempt to recover any of his past expenses on the project. He merely requested they start paying for his services, and when they refused, he stopped providing the service.
If this counts as extortion, it sets a VERY dangerous precedent... A precedent that basically makes slavery legal, by making it a crime to stop performing a voluntary service.
On the bright side, assuming he doesn't end up in prison for a few years, he has a fairly good case for harassment, with monetary damages resulting. He could end up getting considerably more than his $300k (which, again, he did not actually try to bill the county for).
Fountainhead Media (MACOMBSHERIFF-DOM)
19950 Denby
Portsmouth, VA 23708
US
Domain Name: MACOMBSHERIFF.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Stanley, Michael (36687838P)
fountainhead_463@hotmail.com
Fountainhead Media
19950 Denby
Portsmouth, VA 23708
US
999-999-9999
Keep a log and record the phone conversations, for quality control purposes of course. Let a few more tickets pile up. When you're sure you've got enough, hire a lawyer, get him fired and a settlement from the department. Maybe a settlement from him personally as well.
Who knows, you might inadvertantly save the life of his wife/girl friend or kids who were destined to be beaten or shot to death after he had a bad day.
old sites are available on the wayback machine.
One of the others ("MSN Search Blocking Results For XFree86?") didn't really have enough data to prove or disprove (so it's probably not worth the 868 comments it attracted).
What are you talking about? if you either click on the link in the story, or go to msn.com, type "xfree86" in the box at the top, then click on search, you only get 1 result, which is porn and it warns you about.
If you go to any other search engine there is more than one result and it isnt this nightcrawler business. google has 2.4 million.
tellingly if you search on google for xfree86 nightsurf, you only get 28 results, none of which is the website that msn throws up.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
The article about the ex-sheriff rapist mentions a William Hackel.
h tm, which states that Mark Hackel ran to be sheriff four years ago after his dad was removed from office and arrested for rape.
The webpage for the current sheriff at http://www.macomb-sheriff.com states that the sheriff is Mark A. Hackel.
Doing a search for William Hackel brings up an article at http://www.freep.com/news/locmac/sher27_20000727.
I *really* hope the wayback machine fubared that page up... it's even worse than the new one.
it boils down simply to "he provided a service, sent a bill, bill went unpaid, he stopped providing the service".
Wrong. If I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then send you a bill for it, that is fraud and/or extortion.
Also, RTFA (in particular, the second link).
The second link is biased, because that's his own website. The first link (which goes to a somewhat unbiased newspaper) clearly says he asked for $300K.
Macomb county is not some podunk area, it is part of metro Detroit
Hmmm... supposedly, they *were* getting 3.5 million hits a month. Their new site, however, is only at 18000 hits, even though it has been listed on slashdot. Now, obviously it will take a little time before everyone that usually went to the sheriff's site figures out that it has changed. Still, if it was such a busy site before, you'd think that *most* of the former visitors would find it -- especially considering that a Google search has the new site listed at the very top. Something seems a little fishy about 3.5 million per month...
Well, that is true - but can you say that it gives Slashdot credibility? I guess it depends on what you define as Slashdot. I have noticed the phenomenon of which you speak more and more over the past year. It *almost* seems intentional at times. That would qualify as questionable journalism in my book, posting a misleading story just so your readers will hash out the details for you.
Think of it this way - *without* the faithful Slashdot readers, how good would Slashdot's journalism be?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Regardless, with the domain name it's IP, a civil issue. It's parked, so the sheriff's office can do the WIPO cybersquatting claim, but, AFAIK and IANAL, it's not criminal.
Who owns the content? If the sheriff's department does, holding the content hostage may be illegal. But then again, there was a private towing company that illegally towed my car from a private lot where I had a legal right to park, and would not return it. They violated two sections of the vehicle code in the illegal tow, then had additional violations (actually flaunting some of them) in the operation of their impound lot. What did the cops say? "This is a civil matter. Pay the impound fees and then sue them."
The cops probably threw him in jail to try to intimidate him, which forced the DA's hand to prosecute, or perhaps it's collusion between the DA and the cops.
The facts will come out at trial. Both sides will tell their stories, a judge and 12 people too dumb to get out of jury duty will decide who is telling the truth, and regardless of the outcome, a civil suit will follow.
Welcome to America, where our courts, fine instruments of law, capable of incredible intricacy and precision in legal thought, are used to bludgeon people like a sledgehammer.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
"3. Didn't anyone every teach him "you don't spit into the wind, you don't tug on Superman's cape, and you don't anger the local Sheriff!"?"
bullshit. piss him off all you like, just don't break the law. i'm not having any of this walking on eggshells around police bullshit. quite a few of my friends are police officers and some of my family members are officers. police are 1) servants of the people and 2) bound to uphold the law.
more simply put...if they fuck with you because they don't like you or you have made them angry without breaking the law, then THEY have broken the law and THEY get to go sit in a cell for a while and think things over. that's the whole godsdamn point of the legal system in our country. NOBODY is above the law...we ALL watch the watchers. to do it any other way would undermine what this country is about.
that having been said, if you read the site (not the article) it appears he may not have tried to collect upon previous monies owed. it looks like he merely told them he would need payment for the future as he could not offset the costs out of his own pocket, using the $300k as an example of the kinds of costs he was talking about. the department refused to pay, thus he had to shut the site down. to which the department responded by arresting him, a gross misuse of the power and trust placed in their hands.
this having all been said i conditionally hope for the following:
1) if he really did ask for $300k in back payment, he needs some time in a small grey cell to think it over.
or
2) if he didn't, and merely asked for payment in the future to offset the costs of running the site. the sherrif and/or whomever made the decision to have him arrested, and possibly the officers who arrested him, should be dismissed and be brought up on charges of wrongful arrest and whatever else they can tack onto 'em.
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
Noo....
What we have learned is, when you are setting up a sweetheart deal with the local sheriff's office, and you bill them an outrageous amount, pocket half and give the other half to the sheriff, make sure you have some sort of evidence on hand to use against the sheriff if people start noticing, so you can say "he made me do it! ".
Good Old Boy Politics 101, learned in CLarksville, TN "The Crime and Corruption capital of Tennessee".
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
You're comparing demanding compensation for a site that you completely own and maintain, to throwing someone in jail, seizing his equipment, and threatening him with a 20 year jail sentance? Get a sense of proportion, man. The most the sheriffs office should have done was tell him to go to hell, or take him to civil court.
Please Note: Pat Ricahrd never attempted to get the sheriff's office to pay him. He informed the sheriff that he could no longer afford to pay for it himself, and that the sheriff would need to come up with a way to finance the hosting/bandwidth. The sheriff refused, beleive that he could continue to have a top-notch high-bandwidth site for free. Have any of you ever had a top notch high traffic site that did not cost you anything? Of course not. Servers, bandwidth, and labor costs money. Pat Richard provided all three of those things for free for several years. He gave the sheriff 2 years to come up with a way to offset the costs of such a service. He gave him an estimate of the cost he had incurred in an effort to make the sheriff understand how costly such things were. When the sheriff refused to finance his own website, Pat was forced to discontinue his services. Period.
for web hosting from pronethosting.net so there. /not a plug just a comment
At least this article get it right in that it states he was not asking for the $300,000 in payment, but just said that is how much it would have cost the county to have the site for those three years. He are the $300,000, but wanted the county to take over the future costs. Detroit Free Press Article Of course, the Sherrif says the money was a DEMAND. Well after a year or more of trying to come up with some sort of agrement and getting no response, he had to shut the site down. The article even points out what both sides agree on certain points: "Both sides agreed on a few points: that Richard started running the site for free a few years ago; that his site became so popular, the Sheriff's Department -- and the public -- came to rely on it. And that Richard decided the site was too costly to run for free any longer. " He got screwed. Period. No due process, no court orders, just a straight up jacking.
key words: "without a court order"
"Do You Have A License For Those Facts?" (my debunking and I'm a certified IP wonk).
And how, pray tell, does one get "certified" as an "IP wonk"? That article was not wrong, and in fact it was relatively on the money.
You're completely overlooking a few provisions of the bill. Mainly Sections 5(A) and 5(C)
For an example of how rules this like this have already gone awry, read about this case over in the UK. In short, a horseracing agency licensed its database of races, start times, horses involved, etc, for use in casino-type betting agencies. William Hill, Ltd, the gambling company, also placed race times, horses, and odds on its website. The EU court ruled that placing even this amount of information on the web was an "unlicensed" use of a subsection of the database.
So, Mr. "IP Wonk", please explain why that won't happen here, given the two clauses above. There are a lot of horse races -- one might even say a "large" number of races -- and the "database" of race times and horses involved is a subset of the larger database of all horse-racing data.
"Your Honor, we conceed that the defendants might have looked /somewhere/ else to get race times, but they had access to race times from us through our database license, which did not allow them to post those facts^W^Wthat database on their website. They /stole/ our property."
And given this country's tendency to "litigate first, and let the court sort it out", plus the courts' willingness to bend over backwards to punish those "pirates", how long before another SCO shows up claiming that the database of error names, numbers, and description strings is theirs? Even Nimmer and Jane Ginsburg, both staunch pro-IP, pro-DMCA lawyers have stated that a database protection bill is unnecessary [pdf].
Of course, I might be wrong. I don't have my "IP wonk" degree yet.
-jdm
On the topic of ownership, using the example above, do you own my van? Hell no again. Now we're all assuming this guy bought the domain himself and paid all the renewal fees. We're all assuming he never received any compensation for the website of *any* sort. This guy is a former reserve deputy. Was he given any sort of time off from his reserve duties for maintaining this site? etc... From the single fairly unbiased article we have to work with, it sounds like this guy is in the right. The other site is run by the defendant so we sure as hell can't trust what it says. Maybe we'll get more facts in the weeks to come. It does sound like the guy is in the right.
While I don't think the guy was totally under a halo on this, the fact that there was no contract is significant. Yes, he agreed to do it without pay, but how long is that good for? It's a verbal agreement. If you volunteer to do something for free, and then it grows into a much bigger thing that is costing you a lot of money, you have to make some kind of arrangement to get paid for it, or stop doing it. He should be glad he did not sign a contract saying he would do it for free, because then there would be some legal grounds against him.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
> I generally tend to ignore American media.
... and if accuracy is not exactly fairness or balance, it's still important ....
Fox is not American. They were Aussie-owned, last I checked...
Just wanted to remind everyone of that, in the interest of accuracy
"The Internet is made of cats."
This was the comment I was hoping to hear so far. Seriously, this guy has balls. I won't mention which company I work for since I would be fired in seconds for releasing non-public financials, but in europe, the land of "WAY WAY WAY overpriced" bandwidth, it costs us about $40,000/year for a sys-admin, $40,000/year for a web master, and from last I heard about $40,000/year for the 6-10 petabytes of bandwidth caused by millions of downloads of our software. So, I figure if we scaled back to 3.5 million hits a month, it would drop hosting to $10,000 a year. So that would be $90,000/year or $7500 a month * 33 months = $247,500. This of couse provides that you count having a full time sys-admin and a full time web master working on the site.
My opinion is that if this schmoo was genuinely doing this good will to begin with, then once the cost became too high, he should have offerred to sell the server, or at least the data and the domain name to the sheriffs department for a reasonable price. The domain should be worth approximately $10 in current market times. The server should cost approximately $500 to be able to handle a sheriff departments web site. Another $2000-$5000 to assist in transferring it over and setting it up. There's a well deserved profit for him.
I don't think there is any dispute as to the nature of the agreement. The guy volunteered to host and maintain the site in exchange for free publicity. Then he decided to stop doing so.
I think that in itself raises a dispute. I've heard that there needs to be some form of payment from both sides in a contract. If I offer to give something away, then you cannot hold me to that. If I offer to sell something, and you give me the payment, then you can. So, there's a question as to whether the sherrif's office "paid" the guy to produce the website, by allowing him to use it for publicity.
But whatever the case, I think an arrest and criminal charge is totally disproportionate. To be charged as a criminal, I feel it should be pretty much indusputable that what the guy has done is clearly a criminal act.